RUSH: Hold your horses, Trump supporters. Hold your horses. When I say, “We’ll examine what went wrong,” come on. You know exactly what I’m talking about, from the standpoint of Cruz supporters. They’re the ones trying to figure out what went wrong today. They are looking for explanations, and I’m sure they have their own at the same time. But we’ll get into all that. Let me give you one little thing: My instinctive feeling right now is that Trump is gonna win, beat Hillary badly, that it could be landslide proportions.
I still don’t think people understand why Trump won this. I don’t think they understand at all the reason people support Trump. And the deeper people are entrenched in politics, and the more they are accustomed to the templates and the handbooks and the theories and the playbooks, the less they’re gonna understand it. The more they try to plug Donald Trump and his campaign and his personality into the professional politician candidate playbook that they use, the farther and farther from the truth they are going to get.
I’ve tried to help. During the course of this entire campaign, I’ve gone to great lengths to try to explain to people what it is about Trump, why he has his supporters, why they support him, and what you have to do to separate them from Trump. Basically, you can’t. That’s the bottom line. There’s nothing any professional politician can do. They’ve done everything that they knew how to beat a candidate. They threw everything they had at Trump. I mean, the negative ads that they ran against him, these #NeverTrump guys and their PACs in all these states?
In indiana alone the amount of money spent on negative ads against Trump? And it didn’t work. And in their world, negative ads always work. So they’re out there scratching their heads today. You’ve got #NeverTrump people saying, “I said I was never gonna vote for Trump, and I’m never gonna vote for Trump — and I mean it.” You’ve got some people thinking about looking for third-party candidate. Others, it’s a matter of honor, a matter of principle, to never vote for Trump. But they’re caught between that and Hillary Clinton becoming president.
We’re back to, “Well, let’s just let Hillary win so people will find out how bad it is.” I’m tired of that. We already know how bad it is. We know how bad it is with Hillary. We know how bad it is with Bill Clinton. We know how bad it is with Barack Hussein O. We know how bad it is with the American left. We don’t need any more destruction. We don’t need anymore lessons. And, by the way, leaving it to the American people to figure out hasn’t worked out well, either, has it?
Somebody’s gonna have to tell ’em how bad it is. I mean, they instinctively know things are not great. But look at the Millennials. My point is, the millennials think the country’s seen its best days. They don’t blame the Democrats for it ’cause nobody tells them. Nobody explains to them that the reason they are in great suffering and have (in their own minds) no future is because of Democrat Party left-wing policies. But nobody tells ’em that. So they are left to assume that America is flawed.
“America was flawed from its founding, and all these flaws — and all this racism, bigotry, self-hatred, all that — is coming to the fore now, and America has caught up with itself.” This is, sadly, what some of these people think. So a guy comes along and tells ’em he’ll make America great, identifies problems, and then proposes solutions; doesn’t hold back. It’s not hard to figure any of this out. Against a message like Trump’s, if your counter message is, “I’m the most conservative guy running,” that’s not going to work.
Even if you are, and even if you’re good at it, it’s not gonna make a dent. Because none of this is about ideology right now. That’s why everybody’s talking about populism having over taken conservatism. That hasn’t happened, but at this moment of time it looks like it. In this particular set of circumstances it looks like it. Any number of things that 17 people tried — and Hillary Clinton is next up, and we shall see.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Associated Press. They’re happy today, obviously.
“As Trump Wins, Clinton Exploring How to Win Over Republicans.” This story… This is why I think stories like this indicate just how far in the sand a bunch of leftists have their heads right now, or maybe in other places. “With Donald Trump all but clinching the Republican nomination for president, Hillary Clinton is beginning to explore ways to woo Republicans turned off by the brash billionaire. The Democratic front-runner’s campaign believes Trump’s historically high unfavorable ratings and penchant for controversy may be enough to persuade a slice of GOP voters to get behind her bid, in much the same way so-called Reagan Democrats sided with the Republican president in the 1980s.”
Now, you can’t blame Hillary for thinking this and you can’t blame the AP because there’s all kinds of Republicans out there saying that they’re gonna do just that. They’ve been proudly saying it for months now. They’re proudly saying it last night. Yes, they have honor. They have a deep sense of morality and commitment, and they are #NeverTrump-ers. They were not big for Cruz, either. Don’t buy into that. And they — they — are gonna go Hillary Clinton because everything else is just unacceptable to them. And yet she is.
Now, you read this story and you would never know that Hillary Clinton is still fighting for her party’s nomination, and she lost another state. You know, whoever did this… It might have been Byron York. I’ve read so much. Back to the Cruz problem for a moment. He gets to Indiana. Big plans in Indiana. The problem is, he didn’t win much before Indiana. Here’s a good question. People want to address: How do you go from a landslide win in Wisconsin that takes out pretty much everybody except one other guy, Kasich — who’s getting out today at five o’clock, by the way.
How do you go from a landslide win in Wisconsin to a landslide loss in Indiana? This is something to keep in mind. When you’re asking this question, you consider it. After your landslide win in Wisconsin, you end up being — as far as everybody’s concerned — the only possible person now that could stop Trump. You are it, for the #NeverTrump-ers. You are it for whoever, and however many people there are who do not want Donald Trump. You are it. You are getting all the media attention, as that one person who can stop Donald Trump.
You, Ted Cruz, are getting all of the attention. All the interest is focused on you. “How in the world do you go from landslide victory in Wisconsin to what happened in Indiana, with added media attention?” Now, the people asking that question, they’re answering it themselves. Well, Cruz couldn’t withstand the media. “The more people got to know Cruz, the more they hated him.” Bohunk! Well, maybe not bohunk. That whole “hate Cruz” business has ramifications for all of conservatism, folks, because not all of that is aimed at Cruz specifically.
A lot of people want to think it is, but it isn’t. But the theory is this. (Stick with me here.) Cruz decides Northeastern states like New York and the five two weeks ago that Trump won every county, “You know, I don’t have a chance. I’m not gonna seriously compete there, like I didn’t compete in New Hampshire,” and his strategy was to pick the states like these evangelical states in the South. Pick up those states, and he’s just gonna swamp everything, sweep away everything, walk away with everything and do it that way.
Meanwhile, Trump’s out there trying to win every state. So the way it manifests itself is you get to Indiana, and you didn’t arrive in a vacuum. You arrived having lost five landslides and whatever elections you lost before that. All you’ve got on your record is winning in Wisconsin; that’s a long time ago. So people want to vote for winners. There’s this thing called momentum, whether the media promotes it or not. How do you go from five landslide losses…? Third place, second place, third place.
How do you go from that to expecting to win big anywhere? Indiana, anywhere? Well, let’s apply that to Hillary Clinton. The AP won’t do it. The only reason Hillary Clinton’s gonna win is because the Democrats have rigged that system for her according to their rules, where she’s gonna get all the delegates or however many she needs to win this no matter what the election returns in every Democrat primary are. Now, the Democrats are making the same mistake here that some may have made in the Cruz campaign.
They think that Hillary can go ahead and lose these states, lose every state. She’s losing more than she wins. If you follow the news, it’s clear Bernie Sanders is winning (it seems like) every primary the past month. And accompanying every Bernie Sanders victory story is the fact that he won nothing, that Hillary gets the delegates. So there’s just as many — or proportionally just as many — agitated Democrats. You add up people supporting Bernie Sanders to people supporting Donald Trump, and the people that supported Ted Cruz.
You add up those voters — and if they all vote, too, Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a prayer. I don’t care about the Electoral College. I don’t care about anything else. Just like in terms of the people that are fed up with Washington and the establishment, as we sit here today, she is the lone candidate representing what obviously so many Americans, Republicans and Democrats for their own reasons right now happen to despise. She’s losing the vote in every state, and yet the Democrats expect her to triumph. Where is her momentum?
How in the world does Hillary go from losing after losing after losing to becoming a triumphant victor at the Democrat convention when she didn’t win diddly-squat except superdelegates in the Democrat Party? And I guarantee you, the AP and the media and the Democrat Party, they’re not factoring all of this in because they’re sitting there saying, “We’re the Democrats! We’re invincible. We own the media. We don’t lose.” They don’t have… They haven’t figured out yet that the media wants Donald Trump to be elected president.
They haven’t figured out the media wants Trump in the White House because it’s gonna be the most fun four years they’ve ever had. It’ll be fun. They’ll try to take Trump out. They’ll be able to party with Trump! They’ll go to the White House. They’ll be able to do everything they do as media; they’ll be able to trying to destroy him. He’ll expect it. He’ll toy with ’em. They’ll get to cover him, go wherever he goes. It’s gonna be unexpected, unpredictable, ratings boosts and all kinds of stuff. Make no mistake: In the Drive-Bys, this is universal. There’s nothing exciting about Hillary Clinton.
She’s been there, done that, in a lot of ways.
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